This is an audio transcript of The Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘ America’s waning power ’ Gideon Rachman Hello, and welcome to The Rachman Review . I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about American foreign policy. It was recorded last weekend at the FT Weekend festival in New York in front of a live audience. My guests are Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia; Katherine Thompson, who until recently was a senior official in the Pentagon under President Trump; and Philip Gordon, who was national security adviser to vice-president Kamala Harris. So after a second war with Iran, where is Donald Trump taking US foreign policy? Donald Trump voice clip: We took in more oil yesterday than we’ve ever than has ever gone through the strait. You probably see that. We have an oil gusher. The strait is totally open, you know that, and we’re negotiating. We’ll see how that all goes. But we have two things. We h...
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French Elites Face a Mamdani Moment of Their Own July 1, 2026 at 2:00 PM GMT+10 The face of France’s “Mamdani moment?” Photographer: Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg Save Translate France’s 2027 presidential election is increasingly looking like a shoo-in for the far right, or at least a hard-fought scrape by the center. But what if something closer to a “ Mamdani moment ” is in store? Investment banker Matthieu Pigasse last week argued that leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, who, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, clinched the Gen-Z vote with calls to seize the means of production, has a “head start” in a crowded field of candidates vying to challenge the far-right National Rally’s rise. In an interview on LCI TV, the banker cited “popular anger” against an “exhausted” capitalist system and said he’d vote for the far left over the far right in a runoff between the two, even if he had some differences of opinion with Melenchon.
Australia’s Evolving Appreciation for Soccer In a country dominated by cricket and rugby, it took a while for the sport to catch on. Now, with the Socceroos making a deep run in the World Cup, the country is fully behind them. I wasn’t raised in a religious household, and I went to a series of secular schools, but in my early twenties, I became a disciple of the Greek Australian soccer coach Ange Postecoglou. Postecoglou is best known, globally, as a former coach of Tottenham Hotspur, a perpetually underachieving Premier League club that, after his arrival, won their first trophy in seventeen years. (He also nearly got them relegated.) I knew Postecoglou as the coach of the Australian men’s national team, which he led, with similar inspiration and inconsistency, 2013 to 2017. Soccer in Australia has historically been a forgotten sport. It was a game played mostly by migrants and by women, and was always overshadowed by cricket, rugby, and Australian-rules football . To watc...
Chip Stocks Losing Their Shine Spells Trouble for South Korea Get caught up. Chips are down: Samsung and SK Hynix have fallen from recent highs.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg Save Translate The gloss is rapidly coming off chip manufacturers, which were the clear winners in the first half of the year amid the frenzy for AI. Take a look at Samsung. The shares are back to where they were in late May after tumbling 21% from its June high. Fellow peer SK Hynix has lost 25%. Japan’s Kioxia is down 30% from last month’s peak. In the US, Micron and Sandisk both closed more than 10% lower overnight. There are rising concerns over an excess in AI capacity, seen for instance in Meta’s plan to sell computing power, but really it seems gravity is catching up to stocks that sucked in funds from almost every other sector . Continued losses would challenge markets that have become reliant on these companies, especially South Korea — where the Kosp...
Warsh Must Beware of Curves Flattening to Deceive The bond market is taking him seriously, but that’s not necessarily great news. July 2, 2026 at 2:00 PM GMT+10 Warsh in Portugal: Neither an innocent nor a boor abroad. Photographer: Dirk Claus/ECB Save Translate To get John Authers’ newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here . Kevin Warsh certainly isn’t taking anything for granted, but he was justified in telling the central banking conference in Sintra, Portugal , that his chairmanship of the Federal Reserve is going according to plan so far. “Expectations of inflation over the first four weeks of this period have come down,” he said, and “inflation risks have come down.”
The World Has Failed the Uyghurs July 2, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET Credit... Carolyn Drake Listen · 6:54 min For the past decade, an uncrossable distance has separated me from my daughter. She is in the Uyghur homeland — what China’s government calls Xinjiang — living under Beijing’s totalitarian drive to erase our culture. I am in exile, having fled nine years ago to avoid arrest. When I last saw her, she was a wide-eyed 6-year-old. She is growing up today without her father in a country that wants her to forget who she is. Countless families like mine have been shattered by Beijing’s drive to forcefully assimilate Uyghurs into Chinese society. As many as one million Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities were sent to detention facilities between 2016 and 2019, forced to renounce Islam and subjected to Communist Party indoctrination. China says it closed those facilities, but Uyghurs still face coerced labor , mass surveillance ...